Max Match Play discussion

I posted this in the Match Play thread but was recommended to also post it here.

I finally had someone leave mid-tourney in a Max Match Play tournament and had a chance to put my workaround to the test.

Basically, if a player leaves I add a new Dummy Player and Dummy Arena, then I take the current match the absent player is on, replace their opponent with the Dummy Player and change their arena to the Dummy Arena and just leave them there while the tournament goes on. This way, the player’s completed games are not disregarded so their previous opponents are not affected other than dragging down their Strength-of-Opponent tiebreaker value.

As an added bonus, after missing a few rounds, he showed back up and I was easily able to add him back in by completing his match with the dummy player, and then deleting the dummy player and removing the dummy arena from the tournament.

Im sure there are plenty of ways for this approach to mess up in some way but, in this instance, it worked out well.

@haugstrup recently added a new feature for Max Match Play.

If a player leaves the tournament early you now have a choice between deleting all matches involving that player or leaving those matches intact. Choose the option that best fits your tournament.

I think it’s great to have this option, but using it does have the potential of causing some other trouble for the tournament. This problem comes up when you use the new option to not delete matches for someone leaves after playing an odd number of matches. I wrote up my thoughts on how the TD can adapt the tournament to handle this situation when it comes up. There’s no best answer here as they all have pros and cons. I suggest you pick a strategy (or a decision tree of strategies for different circumstances), write that plan into your IFPA calendar submission, and stick to it if the issue comes up.

Description of the problem

As the Deactivate player description says, “you can leave the games intact but risk having a player left over at the end without an opponent.” I think it’s easier to understand the scenario of “player left over without an opponent” if you think of it it as a “half-game problem”.

You have a tournament with Players A, B, and C.
Tournament duration is 2.

A plays B.
A plays C.
Player C leaves the tournament.
Now you’re stuck.
A has played 2 and can’t play any more, but B has only played 1 and needs to play 1 more.

To describe this problem more generally, you can think of each game as being two half-games. The total number of half-games that need to be played by people remaining in the tournament needs to be even for the pairings to work at the end. When player C leaves they take 1 half-game out of the pool of games to be played. There are a total of 0 half-games to be played from A and 1 half-game to be played from B. Every time you play another game you’re subtracting two half-games, so you’ll never get back to an even number of half-games even if you increase or decrease the duration.

Options for handling the problem

A. Deactivate the player who left then delete their most recent result. Their opponent from that game will have to play a game against someone else to replace their deleted game.

B. Include the player who left in pairings one more time. That opponent gets a free win. Then deactivate the player who left.

C. Do nothing when they leave and get lucky when a different player leaves later in the tournament also with an odd number of games played. (They balance each other out.)

D. At the end of the tournament, when the last pairing is created you’ll have 1 player waiting with 1 game to play and at least one active match with 2 players on their last game. Play that game as a 3-player game. Use adjust points to give the waiting player +1 point if they get 1st or 2nd.

E. At the end of the tournament, pair the player who needs a game with someone who already has the maximum number of games. This game is not recorded in match play. If the player who needs a game wins give them a +1 point adjustment. The points of the player who they’re paired against is not affected by the result of this game. (Recommendation to choose this player as someone who is one point ahead of the player who needs a game so they have some natural incentive to defend their spot in the standings rather than giving up a point and creating a tie.)

F. Increase the duration by 1. (Only works if you started with an even number of players.)

Combining options

You may want your tournament’s rules to lay out a plan for different solutions depending on the situation.

Here are some examples:

A + B: In the situation where a player leaves the tournament early we will evaluate whether that would result in a situation where the tournament ends with impossible pairings (e.g. the player had completed an odd number of matches). If it does and the departing player had won their previous match, that match result will be deleted and their previous opponent will get a chance at replaying that game with a different opponent. If the previous match was a loss for the departing player, then they will be included in pairing one more time and the player in the new pairing will get an automatic win (i.e. the player is not considered dropped until they do not show up for that newly paired match).

F + C + D: In the situation where a player leaves the tournament early we will evaluate whether that would result in a situation where the tournament ends with impossible pairings (e.g. the player had completed an odd number of matches). If the tournament had started with an even number of players we will increase the tournament duration by +1 match. Otherwise, we’ll wait until the end of the tournament before addressing the situation. If another player leaves later also with an odd number of games completed then no changes will be needed. If we get to the end of the tournament where creating matches results in one player left with a single game to play and all other players paired off for their final game, then we’ll randomly choose one of the games that was just created and will play that as a 3 player game. We’ll randomly determine player order for that game. Match result and Adjust Points will be used to record the result such that the 1st and 2nd place players both get a point and the 3rd place player does not get a point.

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Many thanks for the implementation. This helps a lot.

In Europe, a lot of head-to-head is played, but more often Swiss than MM
One of the reasons for this is that you have to do some tricks at the end of the tournament to make it work without that you have duplicate pairings.
It’s very good that you can limit the number of simultaneous games, but you still don’t have a direct influence on who gets paired.
-It would be great for the future if you could pause players who have already played a lot more games than the others. It would also have the benefit for exampe of allowing players to eat without stress.
-As an alternative to “Create number of matches” would be creating matches only for players with already played maximum X number of games would also be a good idea for the future.
As my english is not perfect here an example: Some players have played only 8 games, but some have already played 12, you could then determine that only players who have played a maximum of 11 games are drawn.

Have you tried it? I think the new feature can be used to accomplish what you described as pausing a player.

Deactivate the player who needs to be paused; uncheck the delete matches checkbox; activate them again when they return.

You may need to keep an eye on the number of matches other players play while someone is paused. If you go past a round robin then I would expect repeat pairings before everyone has played the paused player. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it may not be what you and your players expect.

I just tested it and it works great. Would it be possible to set the checkbox for deleting players with the last entry?
I run MM tournaments with more than 50 players. For example, last third of the tournament, I would have to uncheck 5-15 players every round. It is also very dangerous if you want to be quick and accidentally and want to pause a player but forget to uncheck it. Since there is no further warning, all games would be deleted, which could be a disaster.

Since this function is certainly used extremely often just to pause players, it is perhaps safer to generally set the checkbox directly so that the games are not deleted, so that such an Desaster does not happen.

I have another question:
Over the years many duplicate players have been created. Some of them even have the dublicate IFPA numbers.
Is it possible to delete duplicate players or do I just have to rename them?

Problem with rename is that in older tournaments, Name would also shown renamed.

That’s fine feedback. I’ve change the checkbox so it defaults to off.

There’s an entire player merge tool available so you can merge duplicate players: Match Play Events

You can also “retire” players. Then they won’t show up when you look for players in new tournaments.

Great many thanks for your support.
You do really great job with matchplay.events

The duplicate IFPA numbers should be fixed by the IFPA. Honestly this should never happen as it’s quite possible to cheat/“sandbag” this way.

That’s a misunderstanding. No same IFPA number for different player
There are same duplicate player with same ifpa-number

The new option to pause players by temporarily deactivating them is a great thing. This way, everyone can take a break when they want and it’s particularly useful in my location because there’s simply not enough space for everyone to take a meal break at the same time with almost 60 players.

However, the deactivation function is too time-consuming in larger tournaments to pause players who have played almost all the rounds towards the end of the tournament so that everyone plays the last two rounds at the same time to avoid multiple identical pairings.

I used the following trick: 28 rounds were planned. Previously, I also had a limited number of 24 rounds. When almost everyone had reached 24 rounds, I increased it to 26 rounds and when most of the 26 rounds were reached, I increased it to the final 28 rounds.

This is a lot of work and confuses the players. As I have mentioned before, it would be better not to specify how many games are created when creating the rounds, but to specify that “only players who have played a maximum of x rounds” are drawn. This is the only way to ensure that you don’t end up having to play the same players repeatedly without too much effort for the TD.